Lord tedric, p.6
Lord Tedric, page 6
Tedric shook his head. It was hard taking this woman at all seriously. "I can only speak to the rebel leaders."
Jania laughed. "I am their leader."
"You?" said Tedric.
"Me." She sat down across from him, still laughing. "This is Evron Eleven, not one of your party planets. We don't have time to worry about traditional roles. I have to work in the mines as hard as any man. I can lead them, too."
"I wasn't disputing your abilities," Tedric said. "Then perhaps you won't mind answering my questions."
CHAPTER 5
Rats in the Pits
The High Priestess of A cadium, who is said to see the farfuture with the clarity of the present moment, resides in a mud hut on Jayne Isle at the center of Lake Nohowan in North Lomarr. Few ever dare venture there, for the Priestess is known to be as LI whimsical as she is powerful and ready to kill a man as easily as she might please him.
Tedric approaches the mud hut without hesitation and bangs on the wooden door with the hilt of his sword. "Open up, old woman. I, Tedric, Lord of the Marshes, have come to discover the whereabouts of Sarpedium, the black wizard.
A crone with swollen black eyes opens the door. She squints at Tedric, then cackles in glee. "But you are Tedric, the man of science not magic. You have no use for my powers. Go away andflnd the wizard yourself. Go or you will die in your footsteps."
Tedric reaches out before the crone can close the door. He grips her bony throat and says, "You will serve me, old fool, or you will die."
"Your sword holds no power here," she gasps. " Will you try it?" He senses the fear beneath her scorn.
"Release me."
" When you have served me.
cannot serve ou here."
edric lets her go. The hut, inside, reeks offoul fumes. The Priestess mixes her bitter brew and drinks deeply of the potion. Shefalls to thefloor and squirms. Tedric clutches her shoulders.
The Priestess chants: "Sarpedium... black wizard... I see a cold, cunning, cruel face...
he stands among youth... women... lovely maidens... they dance... he-"
Tedric slaps her. "No riddles. The truth, fool. I want it now. Where is Sarpedium.@"
But he will learn no morefrom her. Magic works only through riddles. Tedric must learn that, too.
The traincar in which they rode crawled along the underground rails at a velocity of less than five kilometers per hour.
But that was deliberate.
Their guide, Jania, wanted them to see, and for that, haste would serve no useful purpose. Tedric himself, as patient as he could be, had remained content all day simply to watch and observe. Now, as the traincar plunged downward toward the deepest pits, his ears kept plugging. Tedric coughed and swallowed to clear the passages. Behind, in the rear, Nolan and Keller did the same. Jania seemed unaffected by the rigors of their descent. She had spent at least a dozen years in the mines, if she was indeed Keller's wife, as he continued to claim, and had only infrequently glimpsed the light of day in that time. The four of them rode alone. There were no guards, and Jania carried nothing deadlier than a slim, handma dagger that looked too brittle @o kill.
There was i
escape down here for anyone. In the past few hours, Tedric had seen enough to convince him of that.
The idea of this tour was Jania's own. When she had first come to get them, the women with her (and a lone man) had argued vehemently in opposition. Jania had won out, the force of her personality more than sufficient to carry her side. Tedric decided that in order to break the spine of the rebellion he knew exactly where to begin: with Jania.
Already, in one short day among the rebels, he had seen enough to convince him that she alone among them was a natural leader. But did he want to break the rebellion?
What he had seen and learned today had made that suddenly an open question. Jania touched the handbrake and the traincar slowed to a stop. She reached past Tedric and pointed outside. "We're stopping. This is something else I think you should see."
"Not more," said Nolan bleakly, from his place in the back seat. His voice resembled that of a beaten man. "Haven't we endured enough horrors to suit you?"
"You haven't endured them," Jania said. "You've seen them. That's not the same."
Tedric understood what she meant, but he also sympathized with Nolan's fatigue. Of them, only Keller had remained untouched by what Jania had shown them; but Keller had lived here before, and Tedric doubted very much had changed in the interim.
Jania touched a dashboard control that ignited a faint light on the outside of the car.
"Now look and tell me if that's enough," she said.
With the others, Tedric tried to look, but a thick mist, almost a fog, hugged the bottom of the cavern and rose here and there in thick swirls. Jqnia touched another control, and then they could hear the sharp, steady beat of picks and Shovels. Tedric stared and finally made out through the mist a small, moving figure. Then there was another. And a third. One stepped out of the mist, pushing a barrow in front of him, and moved alongside the traincar for a brief moment. He-although in truth it was most likely a girl-seemed unaware of their presence. Tedric listened to the creaking wheels of the barrow as it disappeared in the distance.
"They're children," Nolan finally said. "Yes, and do you know why?" Jania asked. "No, not exactly. I'm not... not surprised, though." After some of the things he had seen today, Tedric doubted that anything would ever surprise him again.
"Guess," Jania said.
"It's because of the gas," Keller said. He spoke softly, recalling the facts from long-buried memories. "It kills them."
"Exactly," she said. "It kills them."
"You don't mean that white stuff, that mist?" Tedric said.
"It's a gas sealed deep beneath the planetary surface and released by the digging. It doesn't kill at once. Don't misunderstand me.-If you or I went out there and walked around, we'd get sick but we wouldn't die. The children seldom get sick. They simply die."
Tedric watched the ghostly figures of the chil-
dren as they drifted through the pale cloud of deadly mist. "Then why is if necessary to use children?" "For the same reason anyone is used here. We're submen, subwomen, and thus not quite human. We're expendable, and the children are even more expendable than the rest of us. If you have to losea worker, it might as well be one too young to carry a proper load."
"Children grow up," Nolan said.
"Not here. Not in these pits. I've stayed alive for twelve years and I'm considered a freak. a raritv among rarities."
"Then why not protect them some way? The gas leak could be sealed up. Oxygen masks could be provided."
"That's all been tried. Years.and years ago when the operation began here. The leaks can't be sealed because that would mean sealing up the Dalkanium that's in there too, and Dalkanium mining is, after all, our only business here. As far as protective masks are concerned, that's been tried and it hasn't worked. Th@y slip, they come loose, people forget to wear them. Have you ever tried to force a child to wear something like that for hours at a time?"
"Then don't use children."
'I've already explained to you why that must be done."
"It's murder," Nolan finally said, giving up his argument.
"That's what I've been trying to show you."
Jania released the brake, and the traincar rolled on.
It had been the same all day, one scene following
another with no apparent end. Tedric felt numb. Worse than numb. He felt sickened.
"Oh, I could show you more," Jania said as she drove. "I could have brought you close and let you see the faces of those children. You would have sworn some of them couldn't be younger than eighty. But it's all the same. It's all terrible. And yet you come here and tell us we're wrong to rebel. You tell us to go back to work for the good of the Empire."
"I never told you that," Nolan said, "But you believe it."
"No, not me. Never."
Jania laughed. The traincar wheeled around a sudden sharp corner, then dropped with unexpected velocity. "This will be the last of it," she said. "One more thing to see, and then we'll head back up. This is the bottom shaft. This is what it's taken a century to reach. I thought you'd be interested in seeing what so much suffering has finally accomplished."
Tedric nodded, gripping the edge of his seat tightly to keep from tumbling forward. The day had begun with a brief private meeting with the corporation supervisors held hostage by the rebels. The men-none were women-seemed no worse off for their captivity. They were healthy, well-fed, and-this was the impression Tedric received most strongly-thoroughly confused by what had happened. As the day progressed and he saw more and more of the reality of the mines, he couldn't help wondering if these apparently decent men had any accurate conception of what went on under their au,t ority. Jania explained that the supervisors
themselves seldom ventured far into the mine shafts. They set annual quotas and daily allotments but left the actual responsibility for meeting these up to the miners themselves anda handful of trustee foremen chosen from the ranks of the workers. "And where are these foremen?" Tedric asked. "Did they join your rebellion or are they prisoners, too?" "Neither," Jania said softly. "They're dead."
Coldblooded murder, whatever its motive, disturbed him, but so did the economics of the situation, and he had come to understand, during the course of Jania's tour, why Nolan called it slavery. The workers were paid a set wage, it was true, but no money exchanged hands. Instead, a paper sum was recorded each year and from this amount food, lodging, clothes, tools and transportation were deducted. At the end of the first year, a worker might have a considerable sum credited to his name, but it was never sufficient to pay for the price of return passage, and it never would be. Jania had shown them her own calculations, which indicated that, with the high cost of injuries and accidents,a worker would have to spend at least twenty years in the mines to build up enough credit to pay for a trip to the nearest inhabited world, and no worker ever lived that long. Tedric asked Jania if she knew of one person who had succeeded in leaving Evron Eleven alive, and she said the only examples she knew were a few males who had volunteered to serve in the navy and earned their freedom that way. For a woman, there was no way out, and for that reason-as wellas what she called feminine endurance-the percentage of women in the mines continued to rise.
There was also the question of the Dalkanium itself. Jania believed that the element was sufficiently active in its raw form to be the cause of much of the physical ills of the miners. "If a landSlide doesn't get you," she said, "or a cave-in, a gas leak or a vicious foreman with a whip, then the Dalkanium itself is a slow death of its own."
Tedric had spoken to workers who seemed to be seventy and eighty years old. Jania swore there was no one in the mines much past thirty.
The traincar was moving faster now. Even in this absolute darkness, Tedric sensed the walls of the tunnel flashing past.
He had seen no reason to raise the subject himself, but Nolan apparently preferred to be more direct. "If this is the end of our tour," he asked Jan'a, "then what's going to happen to us now Tedric heard Jania chuckling softly. "What do you expect?"
She had revealed at the beginning of the tour how she and the other rebels had learned of their presence on the surface of Evron Eleven. It was as Nolan had guessed: a message picked up from the orbiting Eagleseye had given away their probable landing site. But the message was not aimed at the I rebels. Its interception might have been an unforeseen accident. Tedric was not ready to blame Carey quite so soon.
"Then who was he calling?" Nolan had asked. "He had to be trying to alert the rebels.
There's nobody else here but us."
"Have you forgotten the Wykzl ship so soon?" Tedric asked.
"But why would Carey be telling them about us?"
Tedric had not been able to answer that question. But it was something worth thinking about, an intimation of a far more complex situation than any of them had expected.
Jania, still chuckling, attempted to answer Nolan's question regarding their fate. "To tell you the truth, I haven't made a final decision. I'll say one thing, though. The maiority of us don't favor having you killed."
"Well, that only makes sense," Nolan said. "We could help you, Jania, argue your case in places where it matters."
"No." She laughed without humor. "Don't try to fool me with false promises. No one can help us, not even ourselves."
"Then what do you intend doing with us?" Tedric saw no reason to keep silent now that Nolan had raised the matter.
"Most likely, we'll do nothing more to you than what you've already done to us. We'll put you to wor k-you and the other supervisors. We'll let you have a taste of the life you've forced us to endure."
"You can't blame us," Nolan said. "My family has historically opposed mercenary labor systems. It's the Careys you ought to be after."
We don't have them. We have you."
"But that's not fair."
"Neither is this," she said, waving a hand at the walls flashing past.
For Tedric, the most puzzling thing he had seen
here in the minqs was the way the workers continued to go about their regular tasks in spite of the success of their rebellion. He had asked Jania about this and she had said that most had indeed quit at first. "But then they found themselves with time on their hands," she said, "and down here, what can you do? Eat? Sleep? That grows boring after a while. Read books? Watch videos? Most of us don't have the eyes for that anymore. Sit and wait and hope that we might be saved? No, we couldn't just do that.
So we went back to work. It happened slowly at first. One person, then another, until now, as you can see, nearly everyone is working again. Before you came, I was lifting a pick myself. I hated it, I loathed myself, but what else could I do?"
For Tedric, her explanation was perhaps the most horrible thing of all.
The traincar was slowing now. Tedric relaxed his grip on the seat and leaned slowly back against the cushion rest. He heard the gentle whining of brakes and saw Jania's hand pumping fitfully in the dark. The car ended its descent and moved on a flat plane.
Then it stopped.
"Here," Jania said. "This is it-the end. Come on, you'll have to go out to see this."
"Won't we require protective gear?" -Nolan asked.
"You mean because of the Dalkanium? Oh, no. You'll live. Don't worry. That's the least thing you have to fear."
Reaching forward, she touched a lever that simultaneously ignited a small outside searchlight and caused the roof of the car to roll back. Jania leaped over the side, and Tedric joined her. Nolan nd Keller came more hesitantly. In the circle of illumination given off by the light, there was nothing to see but the rock walls and floor of the narrow tunnel. Still, distantly, Tedric heard t . he now familiar rhythm of falling picks and shovels. He noted also that the rails'euded here. Jania was right. This was indeed the end of her world "We'll go this way." Jania switched on a small hand flashlight, and led them down the length of the tunnel. The roof seemed very close overhead and as they proceeded it came even closer. It seemed cold down here, too. The air was thin and damp. Nolan shivered and rubbed at his arms. Then someone screamed.
The four of them stopped. Tedric listened and heard, the scampering of tiny feet in the surrounding darkness. It sounded more like an animal than anything even remotely human.
"Be careful," Jania said. "They won't hurt us but they can be frightened."
"Who's theyo" Nolan asked.
"You'll see-soon enough." She started off again, and they followed. The tunnel continued to slope toward a point like the tapered blade of a longsword.
Keller said, "I don't remember this part, Jania."
"No, you wouldn't-not unless you had worked down here, and that was never possible.
Only a few of the supervisors knew about this before the rebellion. We only found out later." Tedric thought this was as close as Jania had yet come to acknowledging Keller as her husband.
As the tunnel sloped even further, Tedric ducked his head and bent his knees. With Jania leading, their steps came slowly, as if they were reluctant to reach the end. Jania pointed her light at the rising floor. Tedric saw occasional bright flecks flashing among the dark rocks-the Dalkanium, he assumed. It glowed here and there throughout the black cavern like the peering eyes of tiny motionless insects.
The noise of the workers ahead grew increasingly louder.
Jania stopped. She was breathing heavily. Because of the thin air? Or something else? "I'm going to have to dim the light. Don't be startled."
"Go ahead." Tedric felt like a huntsman stalking unseen prey. But what could it be? he wondered. The noise of shovels and picks made it seem merely human. But that didn't explain his anxiety, his sense that something was very wrong indeed. They moved forward again. Did Tedric really want to reach the end?
The noise stopped suddenly. Ping, ping, ping, then silence. They hear us, thought Tedric. They know we're coming.
But who? Or what?
"Hush," Jania whispered. "Don't speak one more word. Not a whisper."
She took a step. Another. Tedric followed. Then Nolan. Keller. She took a step. Another.
The tunnel turned a sudden corner and there, on the opposite side, the roof dropped abruptly and the sides closed in and the floor rose. Jania crouched down. Tedric peered past her shoulder.
Their bodies blocked the passage.
Jania turned her light ahead.
They saw it.
Tedric gasped. Nolan stifled a cry. Keller murmured, "Oh, no. Oh, no."
"Hush," Jania whispered. "Just -look. Don't move or talk. They're easily frightened."
At the very end of the tunnel-the point of the sword-five of them stood. Five... what?
Men? Women? Children?
Five creatures-rive vaguely human beings. None stood higher than a meter from the ground. Their trunks were the size of a normal man's, but their legs and feet were so shrunken that they barely seemed to exist. And their handshuge, clutching paws-dangled from the slender wrists of arms longer than their bodies.
